Tag: books

THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE
By Jacqueline Kelly
Henry Holt, 2009

Category: Middle grade historical fiction

A few weeks ago, I participated in a discussion about the teen detective in contemporary fiction, and I asked aloud for books that featured female protagonists with a scientific bent. Someone recommended THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE, by Jacqueline Kelly, and I am so very glad they did.

Calpurnia Virginia Tate, known to neighbors and friends as Callie Vee, is a wonderful girl detective. Mentored by her grandfather, she awakens during the glorious summer of 1899 to the mysteries all around her: Why does this single species of grasshopper come in two distinct colors? Why don’t caterpillar have eyelids? What in heaven’s name are those somethings-with-hairs swimming in the river water she looked at through Grandfather’s microscope? Must all girls grow up and become wives and mothers?

Callie Vee is that rare heroine who transcends her time and her place; she inspires readers—at least this one!—to wonder, observe, strive and dream. I highly recommend you make her acquaintance.

(For a proper review, check out this one from Colleen Mondor.)

 

LADYBUGS OF ALBERTA
by John Acorn
University of Alberta Press, 2007

I had hoped to go on a ladybug expedition over the weekend, to share my new-found ladybug knowledge with my kids, and also to psyche myself up for my first week of drafting the citizen science book. Alas, it rained. And rained and rained and rained. It is raining now, even as I type.

And so I did the next best thing: I read about ladybugs.

John Acorn’s LADYBUGS OF ALBERTA is the only regional ladybug field guide in existence. It covers many of the species we have here in the northeastern United States–even though the Alberta in the title refers to Alberta, Canada–and it is the guide that my friends at The Lost Ladybug Project use in the field. And here’s the thing: it’s a great read! Seriously. I’m not one to actually sit and read a field guide, even in a deluge that has kept me indoors for days. But this particular field guide was a pleasure to read … cover to cover.

John Acorn has a wonderful, humorous writing style, and he is a true ladybugster (his term for ladybug enthusiasts). Who but a ladybugster would actually taste his subjects in order to determine which ones are least palatable?

 

This is not nearly as weird as it sounds … If there were any diseases or parasites I could catch, I wouldn’t do it, believe me.

And yet, do it he does:

 

The procedure is simple: I place the ladybug on my tongue, press them gently against the roof of my mouth, remove them unharmed, and swirl the saliva around my mouth. I then take notes.

Now that is dedication.

Here’s to sunshine and to ladybugs and to dedication … I would like to see all of them here at the Burns house over the coming months!

 

I am not kidding! Here’s the story …

I coach my daughter’s instructional league softball team. (Maybe you have heard of us? We are the West Boylston Pink Panthers, and we rock!) I was lucky enough to have help from a brave and beautiful parent, Kristi, who only recently moved to town. Kristi and I worked with the Pink Panthers all season—showing the girls what we could remember about fielding and throwing and (heaven help them) hitting—but didn’t find much time for chit-chat. On Saturday, however, at the end-of-the-season Panthers extravaganza, Kristi and I managed to talk about things other than softball. And it turns out she and I have a lot in common besides our panther-daughters: we are both in children’s books. Kristi works for Scholastic Book Fairs!

There followed a raucous conversation about books. Eventually Kristi let slip that she was currently reading the new Suzanne Collins book.

I nearly fainted.

“You mean the new, new Suzanne Collins book? As in the sequel to THE HUNGER GAMES? As in the Advanced Reader copy of CATCHING FIRE? As in, you actually have the ARC in your house right now? What are you doing here? Why are you not home reading? When will you finish? Please, oh please, oh please can I read it after you?”

Kristi now thinks I am a nut. But that is okay, because I am a nut. And this nut now has in her hot little hands an Advanced Reader Copy of CATCHING FIRE!

Must. Go. Read.

 

DARWIN
By Alice B. McGinty
Illustrated by Mary Azarian
Houghton Mifflin, 2009

Category: Picture Book Biography

There is nothing quite so satisfying to me as a good picture book biography. I adore a quick glimpse into a life, and I admire the restraint and good sense that are necessary to give this glimpse just the right depth and scope. It is hard, I think, to get it all just right in this format. Goodness knows I speak from experience here; I’ve been working to get one particular picture book biography just right for, oh, about four years now. Not. Easy. Alice McGinty and Mary Azarian, however, know the secret; they got DARWIN just right.

I was tempted to be discouraged, actually, by the fact that this beautiful book is out in the world and my own picture book biography–similar in so many ways–is still sitting on my hard drive. Alas, there was Charles, on the very last page of the book, sharing this wisdom:

Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticized, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself … I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this.

No woman either.

Happy Monday!

 

THE GREEN GLASS SEA
By Ellen Klages
Scholastic, 2006

It seems we Burnses are the last people on Earth to read this book, so I probably don’t need to tell you that it is about two eleven-year-old girls living in the top-secret town of Los Alamos, New Mexico—nicknamed the Hill—at the end of World War II. Their parents are involved in an equally secret project, a gadget that will end the war. It is an intense time, but Dewey and Suze are regular girls, dealing with the not-so-secret issues of being young and just a little different.

We loved this book. It spoke to all of us: two ten-year-old boys, one seven-year-old girl, and one thirty-nine-year-old mom. The kids were swept up in the history and are very keen to read more about the Hill and the Manhattan Project. Their reaction to the gadget and the ramifications of its success surprised and worried me. My own reaction mirrored that of Mrs. Gordon, Suze’s mother: “Christ. What have we done?” (This surprised no one in this house.) The book gave us a platform to discuss difficult questions, though, and I am always down with that.

My favorite moment in this novel was a writing moment. Dewey was given the great honor of visiting the secret treehouse of Charlie and Jack, brothers also living on the Hill. The threesome trudged through the flat landsacape of the hill, kicking up dust in every shade of brown and army green, and eventually came to the treehouse:

Dewey climed up the ladder, not as fast as Jack, but without any hesitation. Charlie appeared a few seconds later, the knapsack on his back. He took it off and dropped it with a thump, raising a spray of dust motes that sparkled for a few seconds in the afternoon sun.

Did you catch it? The word sparkled? It was masterful. The landscape until this moment had been so drab that those sparkling dust motes took my breath away. They gave the treehouse a special place in the story, foreshadowed that magnificent green glass sea, and, at the same time, made me worry for Dewey: they sparkled for only a few seconds, after all. My hackles were raised. So many emotional reactions elicited by one perfectly chosen, perfectly placed word.

We’ve added the sequel, WHITE SANDS, RED MENACE to our summer reading list. At the moment it is in the number four spot, behind this, and this, and this. (Hey, don’t mention that last one to Mr. Burns, okay?)

Have a great weekend, friends!

 

THE LIFE CYCLES OF BUTTERFLIES
by Judy Burris & Wayne Richards
Storey Publishing, 2006

Category: Middle grade nonfiction

Since I shared my favorite recent adult book on butterflies, I decided it was only fair to share my favorite recent kids book on butterflies. I treated myself to a copy of THE LIFE CYCLES OF BUTTERFLIES while visiting the live butterfly exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History this weekend … and read it cover-to-cover on the train ride home. It is perfect for new butterfly hunters struggling to identify the species in their own backyard.

The book is written by brother and sister butterfly lovers who remember well their early days of butterflying. They’ve included lots of visual information, including photographs of twenty-three common garden butterflies in all four life stages: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. If you know a kid looking for a butterfly field guide, consider this one; it may not be comprehensive as far as species go, but it is a truly great place to start.

And while you are waiting for a copy of the book to arrive, check out the authors’ website; it’s brimming with life cycle photographs and teacher resources.

 

Photo by Deborah Smith Selkow

Those are my boys up there, when they were littler. The picture was taken at our friends Deb and Stan’s house, where we had gone to collect some monarch caterpillars (there are a few in the glass jar between the boys). Stan sent me this picture on Sunday as a Mother’s Day surprise, and it was so unexpected and lovely that I had to share it. Oh, I miss those pudgy little faces!

And how lovely, too, that he sent the picture during the very week that the season’s first Monarch butterflies were reported in Connecticut. Surely they will be here in our backyard soon? (For a complete rundown of spring monarch sightings, visit JourneyNorth.)

Coincidentally, I just finished a fantastic book about butterflies. Now would be the perfect time tell you about it:

DO BUTTERFLIES BITE?
By Hazel Davies and Carol A. Butler
Rutgers University Press, 2008

Category: Nonfiction for grownups and young adults

DO BUTTERFLIES BITE? uses a question and answer format to give readers a comprehensive overview of butteflies and moths, from the basics of their biology and body plans to the complexities of their life cycles and living situations. I learned a lot in its 224 pages; for example, did you know a group of butterflies is referred to as a rabble? Or that silkworm moths—cultivated for more than 5000 years now—have lost the ability to fly? Or that citizen scientists across North America will be counting butterflies over Memorial Day weekend? (More on that here.) I can’t recommend this book highly enough; it’s an interesting read for beginning or intermediate butterfly lovers.

Happy Butterflying!

 

The kids and I happen to be reading Carl Hiassen’s SCAT this week:

We also happened to be shopping today for a gift to give a soon-to-be-ten-year-old friend who loves the outdoors. We bought him James Halfpenny and Jim Bruchac’s SCATS AND TRACKS OF THE NORTHEAST:

And then, in a truly bizarre confluence of, um, poopiness … we had a black bear visit our back yard. I kid you not. Here, check it out:

It was a strange thing, to stand together just inside the glass slider to our yard and watch a bear scour our (now crumpled) bird feeder*, get up and meander through the newly tilled blueberry bed (thank heavens we haven’t planted the bushes yet), and then lope across the yard, past the shed, and into the neighbor’s yard. An honest-to-goodness black bear. In our back yard.

You can bet we were out scat-hunting in the former bird feeding station this morning. Nothing interesting to report.

* Evidence of the bear was first found at my neighbor’s feeders on Easter morning. We let our feeders go dry immediately (they were close to it anyway as our feeding and FeederWatching season ended at the beginning of April), but even still the bear paid a visit. I’m hoping s/he moves on before stumbling upon the neighbor’s beehives …

** I have also spent a good deal of time this week finalizing my presentation for this weekend’s New England SCBWI conference. I’ll be leading a workshop on writing trade non-fiction. It will not be poopy. I promise.